Halifax planner still wonders why he was fired

Bob Bjerke, former director of planning and development for Halifax Regional Municipality, says he still doesn’t know why he was let go. (TOM AYERS / Staff)

Bob Bjerke says he had no idea in August he was about to be fired as Halifax Regional Municipality's director of planning and development, and still hasn’t been given a reason.

“This was completely out of the blue,” he told The Chronicle Herald in a recent interview.

Several developers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said regardless of the reason, Bjerke was simply not the right person to lead the department.

“Put it this way. I don’t think there was a wet eye out there when Bob was shown the door,” one said.

Bjerke said he could neither confirm nor deny reaching a settlement agreement with the municipality, but did say he’s free to talk.

The former chief planner admitted HRM’s planning department has a reputation for taking an inordinately long time to deal with development applications, but he said changes he helped institute were underway and were showing signs of improvement.

The developers, who wished to remain anonymous because they either have open applications with the municipality or hope to do so soon, dispute that.

They said the planning department was slow — one called it “obstructionist” — before Bjerke was hired, and all said it got worse afterward.

One developer said a project that could take six months to get approved in most other Atlantic municipalities took a minimum of two years in Halifax.

Planning department staff may know the rules but they make developers jump through extra hoops because they “fear the notorious phone calls they’re going to get from either the specific politician or the politically connected residents that might be upset about a proposal in their backyard, and that’s really a fundamental problem that I don’t know if anybody can change it,” the developer said.

“It’s been a problem in Halifax for 30 years. It didn’t start with Bob Bjerke and it won’t end with Bob Bjerke’s firing, but certainly Bob took it to a more extreme level than it already was.”

Bjerke said after he was fired he heard from several developers who were sympathetic and praised his work in the planning department.

He also pointed to statistics presented during this year’s budget process indicating that Halifax saw an increase in development and building permits in 2016 and its processing times for most applications were below industry standards.

Wooed in 2014 from Edmonton — where he was director of housing — to modernize Halifax's planning and development, Bjerke brought various services under one department and convinced council to boost his budget to add staff.

Bjerke, who had previously been director of planning in Regina, was hired under former chief administrative officer Richard Butts, who quit in December 2015 and was replaced in September 2016 by Jacques Dube, who came from Moncton, where he had worked in economic development before landing that city's top administrative position.

Dube did not respond to a request for an interview. An HRM spokesman said the municipality won’t comment on personnel matters.

In his first year on the job, Bjerke said he spent a lot of time talking with and listening to councillors, staff, community groups and developers, and quickly discovered the department’s reputation. “I mean, the processes in Halifax are long and really onerous,” he said with a laugh, “but changing those to get the outcomes you're looking for is really critical.”

After that, he set about hiring staff and aligning departmental processes with the HRM By Design planning document and the newer Centre Plan, which is still awaiting final approvals, and the process eventually started to work for most developers, he said.

“Here the culture really has been ‘No, because’ to most of the things coming forward, and that's something the development community had indicated, and that's just not the way I work,” Bjerke said. “I really wanted to focus on outcomes. So let's see if we can achieve the best possible objective, and really looking for ways to find a path to ‘Yes,’ and yes to things that are going to make a big impact in the community.”

In addition, Bjerke said, the planning department is now part-way through a five-year strategic plan that will start to show real signs of improvement within the next year or so.

Bjerke said just three weeks before he was let go he checked in with his relatively new boss, Dube, and it seemed everything was on track.

But leading change in any organization is difficult, and it was certainly different after the new CAO was hired, he said.

“Some of the changes, making progress, became more difficult a little over a year ago,” Bjerke said.

While the department was making gains on as-of-right development applications — considered relatively easy ones to deal with — the process around more complicated developments was hampered by administrative changes implemented by the new CEO, he said.

Despite that, the chief planner said he had good relations with staff, good support from council, and had no indication his boss wanted something different from him.

“In fact, just the opposite,” Bjerke said. “I spent time checking in and making sure that that was what he wanted to see and only had really strong, positive indication that both the work the department was doing was on the right track and the work I was doing was what he was expecting to see.

“Nothing negative there.”

If anything, said Bjerke, it may have been Dube's experience in Moncton — a smaller community with less development — that made it difficult for him to understand the magnitude of the work being done in Halifax.

But Bjerke said he only ever had positive indications from Dube.

“So what transpired, I really can’t say.”

Two developers separately said a prime example of dysfunction within the planning department was what one called the “debacle” around an Ontario developer’s proposal to build twin residential towers next to Saint Mary’s University on the Canadian Martyrs Church site.

Last year, a member of the planning department was set to approve the development, which would have seen two student residences built next to SMU, each around 30 storeys high.

After an outcry from neighbours, Bjerke formally rejected the proposal and the developer appealed to the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board.

In the end, the UARB dismissed the appeal as moot because the church declared the sale null and void after the developer was unable to meet the timeline for a development permit.

But Bjerke said he didn’t think that issue had anything to do with his firing, because staff recommended he take action to reject the development and council approved it.

Peter Polley, president of Polycorp home and condominium builders, said some people see all the cranes and heavy equipment in downtown Halifax and are fooled into thinking that the pace of development has increased in the last couple of years.

“Some people would look and say there’s a lot of construction going on downtown, so things must have gotten better in the last few years,” he said.

“In actual fact, almost all of the construction projects that would be underway in the downtown area weren’t approved under the HRM By Design process. They were actually approved under other processes which predated . . . the current planning regime.”

Polley said he has been trying to get a simple amendment to a development agreement for a year and the municipality has yet to assign a planner to the file.

NOTE: This article has been edited to correct Bjerke's former job title in Edmonton and to fix the timeline around the appeal of a decision to reject a development proposal at Canadian Martyrs Church.